Stuffing the budget box?

New Palm Beach County Elections Supervisor Arthur Anderson turned in his first budget proposal, and the 78 percent increase he wants demands a recount.

The $14.2 million request, up from last year's $8 million, includes $1.7 million to add 500 touch-screen voting machines to the 4,400 the county already has. Mr. Anderson says he needs them to keep pace with the growing population. He also wants $550,000 to add 15 positions, increasing personnel from 39 to 54. One new job would be in marketing and public relations; another would oversee quality improvement and community outreach. Mr. Anderson will have a hard time defending positions for public relations and outreach, especially since he can handle some of that work himself.

Two of the new staff members would run a new Belle Glade office. There's $400,000 to hire private attorneys and $200,000 for more warehouse space to store machinery. Mr. Anderson has included $1.5 million to cover the possibility of a special election. He budgeted $751,500 for runoff elections but won't need it because the Legislature eliminated them.

What Mr. Anderson didn't include is telling. There's no money for printers to create a ballot paper trail, something he supported during last year's campaign against Theresa LePore. He says he will go to the county commission for the money if the state Division of Elections approves the printers. They will be expensive -- probably more than $4 million -- and commissioners should keep that in mind while examining Mr. Anderson's hefty budget. One request that definitely would serve the public is $572,700 to improve the office's Internet site and create electronic access to candidate finance reports. The information currently is available only on paper, creating unreasonable delays in releasing it.

County taxpayers thought that the biggest hit was behind them when they paid $14.4 million for the new touch-screen system after the 2000 debacle. Now Mr. Anderson is asking nearly as much just to make it to next year. Ric Bradshaw, the new sheriff, faces many of the same growth issues as the election supervisor but turned in a budget request that's up only 13 percent from last year. County commissioners have to make Mr. Anderson justify numbers well beyond the high end of reality.